It Can't Happen Here

By March 1938, Jessup’s New Underground cell is fully operational and operating out of Buck Titus’s basement. Because of a new law that restricts printing materials, Jessup, Julian, and Buck steal and refurbish and old printing press, and Pollikop, who is a former bootlegger, smuggles in paper from Canada. Dan Wilgus, due to his fondness for Jessup and his dislike of Itchitt, steals the type from the Informer office and smuggles it to Titus’s house. Other members of the cell include Mary, Sissy, Lorinda, Dr. Olmsted, and Father Perefixe.

The cell produces a paper called the Vermont Vigilance with articles written by Spartan (Jessup) and Anthony B Susan (Pike), in addition to publishing news gathered by other New Underground cells, foreign newspapers, and from the communist underground. Through his comrades and his new work, Jessup is able to find his passion and happiness again, even as he is shocked to realize how many crimes of the regime have been covered up. Jessup finds the precarity of the news they report makes publishing it seem even more important, compared to his obliviousness when he worked at the Informer. He feels important for acting during this moment of crisis, and thinks about what future people might make of their activities, believing “that these historians would be neither Communists nor Fascists nor bellicose American or English Nationalists but just the sort of smiling Liberals that the warring fanatics of today most cursed as weak waverers” (272).